We talk about trauma mostly in terms of damage. What it does. What it breaks. What it leaves behind. What we talk about far less is what trauma interrupts . Not just safety. Not just childhood. But intelligence. Emotional fluency. The person someone might have been if their nervous system had ever learned it was safe. Shawn is a fictional character. But the question he raises is very real: Who might someone have been if trauma hadn’t redirected every ounce of their intelligen

People like numbers. Scores. Labels. Clean edges. I didn’t grow up clean. I learned early how to read a room. Not because I was special. Because guessing wrong was dangerous. Tone. Posture. When someone stopped talking too fast. When someone got quiet. That kind of awareness keeps you alive. Doesn’t leave much room for anything else. I didn’t know what EQ was back then. IQ, sure. That one got talked about. I just knew my head never stopped working and my emotions were either

Thanksgiving Never understood this holiday. Still don’t. People make it sound soft. Warm. Like the world stops hurting because someone puts a turkey on the table. We had one. A table. Just too small for all the other things in that trailer. There weren’t days off. Pain didn’t take breaks. Neither did they. Teachers used to make us write lists of things we were thankful for. Kids making jokes, rolling their eyes like they had real problems. And me, sitting there trying to pick

TOUCH ( Unveiled Publishing) Wins Silver and Community Voice Award in Human & Civil Rights for The 5th Annual Anthem Awards This past month has been surreal in the best way. TOUCH received both a Silver Award and the Community Voice Award in the Human & Civil Rights category at the 5th Annual Anthem Awards . It’s an honor I didn’t anticipate, especially for a book that tackles a subject most people struggle to even acknowledge. Almost all of the feedback I receive about TOUCH